Free Take No Prisoners by John Grant Page A

too small to have a shape; others may be much larger, may be chords of a mountain's size, and their forms may be whatever the whim of chance decrees, from a fire-nostrilled dragon to a cloud of light. But the Ironfolk are unaware of them, for these manifestations last no more than seconds, at the very most, before being negated by their dark counterparts; they might last longer were the Ironfolk astute enough to seek them, for the focus of a hearer's interest is another way of making music resonate with the ocean. But the Ironfolk, of course, don't think to do so.
    The gulfs between the stars are as nothing to those between the island galaxies. Here the waves, undisrupted by islands of frozen probability, can build up to become truly mighty rollers – as vast beside those that range between the stars as those are to the minuscule eddies about the nucleus of an atom. Here, too, the Ironfolk's vessels may move at their fastest speeds, for the distance between one crest and the next is so unimaginably greater. And their bows cast up an accordingly greater spray, whose droplets of music, much larger and more capable of coalescing like-to-like, can last for minutes or even hours. Here, because of their size, there is less variability in the forms of the pieces of frozen probability; most are too large to be anything but suns, or to sound as anything less than an inferno of chords.
    The Ironfolk's intergalactic vessels leave behind them in the blackness of the probability ocean, all unknowing, trails of swiftly failing suns, like luminous pearls streaming from a broken necklace onto the surface of a worldly midnight sea, briefly floating before they sink from sight.
    Like choirs, dying.
    ~
    "They're arguing for a long time once finally Brightjacket's harmony is struck. Who shall go to the Freedom first? The eldern are saying – not all of them, for your Daddy is one of them who does not agree – that the one to take the pathway should be someone so old that he (they prefer it be a glad, as they are eldern) can remember a time before the Ironfolk came to plague us. The weans, on the other side, are plaintive that their youth gives them the right to go first to where all shall once again be young like they are; for, if you think about it, it is memory of a fixed place that gives us Finefolk our ages. Those of intervening years are shouting that ... well, you can imagine the kerfuffle: worse than you two at bath-time. In the end it is Brightjacket who resolves the dilemma, by the simple means of taking the first step himself.
    "There is a delay no longer than the beat of a mouse's heart" – she draws the words out, taking the tip of her forefingers to her lips; her eyes are as wide as the weans' – "and then the timbre of the universe's chant changes just a trifle, and all know that Brightjacket is alive and safe on the world that he chose. As the Finefolk listen longer to the washing of the sea-waves, and to the new note he has added to their sound, they learn that Brightjacket is already constructing a further harmony, there on that new world of his, so that he may step yet further out into the ocean's darkness."
    She describes it well. I can remember the hush that took the throng of us in that bizarre chamber at the core of Snowdon. Then there was singing and piping that made the air a splash of colors, like the sky at sunrise, mottled like a trout's belly, with scales iridescing in every hue that the sun possesses.
    "By the time the Earth had turned once more on its axis, there were fewer than a hundred of the Finefolk left to know it. Those were the ones who wished to stay, who found that the interest of watching the Ironfolk develop their unmusical arts outweighed the disgustingness of having to be so close to them in order to do so. For the rest, there was a universe of worlds that offered welcome. Haven. Peace. The Freedom. Far from the stiffening curse of crafted metal, the Finefolk could become of one song with the